It's a jungle out there, with old hard drives growing legs and scampering off through the trees to spread information outside your walls. But a new breed of metal-munching and drive-slashing monsters has been created to chew up your problems and cut the data leaks for as little as twelve cents a pound, and they are awesome.

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End-of-Movie Nightmare? Just the Beginning Today

Remember the ending of Deliverance, when the dreamer saw the murdered
man's hand thrust through the placid water, revealing a crime that was supposed
to have remained hidden under the still, forgetful lake? An enterprise hard
drive is full of many such visions: not evidence of crimes, but chilling moments
for the company official who learns—or simply worries—that
confidential or proprietary information was not destroyed with a hard drive sent
to auction, donated to charity, packed home with an employee, sent to a
recycling center, or tossed in the trash.

It's not just the old drive that
housed the SQL server that you need to worry about: Workstation drives can
contain passwords, automatic logins, proprietary work, and enough personal
information to compromise an employee's security, or stupid remarks that could
embarrass the company or invite a lawsuit.

Shove past the potentially
damaged—or damaging—employee, and Uncle Sam is looking out for
employees (well, mostly clients) with this alphabet game:

. The Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003 has rules about
timely and proper disposal of consumer information for anyone who collects it.
(Want more details? Visit this page or this one.)

GLB or GLBA. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (also known as the Financial
Services Modernization Act of 1999) applies to all financial institutions. (More
details here.)

HIPAA. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1966 applies to any entity that transmits protected health information (PHI) in electronic form.

But you know about data risks. And you know that drilling holes in hard
drives leaves lots of data to mine between them—and how lame software
wiping is. You can try to follow the Department of Defense's DoD 5220.22-M standard for
overwriting hard drives with due diligence, but:

Who has the time?

You know they keep trying to reconstruct the missing minutes on those
Nixon tapes.

What about the drives you can no longer mount?

If you're really good, you probably take the drives apart and pass over each
platter with a super magnet (the kind that could pick up your car), and then
bend each platter until it breaks. Completely severing the tracks is key to
destroying the data. But who has the time—or strength—for that?